A question I’m often asked and one I’ve seen countless times on Internet forums is whether a person should do cardio before or after resistance training. Before I continue, I want to make it clear that my position is that everyone should do a cardio exercise of their choice for 5-10 minutes before any workout, whether it’s cardio, resistance, or flexibility training. This is vitally important for several reasons, as adequate, low-intensity cardiovascular exercise will warm up the muscles, ligaments, joints, and tendons that will be used more intensely in the next exercise routine. The cardio warm-up also slightly increases your core temperature, increases circulation, slightly raises your heart rate and helps prepare your heart for a higher workload, helps increase lung function, and helps you focus mentally on the next workout. exercises. The most important advantage of warming up with light-intensity cardio is the substantial decrease in risk of injury. If your body isn’t warmed up properly, you’re much more likely to experience an injury to a muscle, joint, ligament, or tendon.

Now back to the question of whether you should do cardio before or after resistance training. There is no single best answer here, and instead you should evaluate your individual fitness goals. If your goal is to increase endurance, endurance, or overall cardiovascular health, I suggest doing your cardio before weight and resistance training. By doing the cardio first (after your 5-10 minute warm-up, of course), you can engage in a more intense cardio session, which could possibly include some intervals where you really push up to your lactic acid threshold or VO2 Max. level. You are much less likely to be able to achieve high-intensity cardiovascular work after participating in a weight-training session. So, in summary, if your goal is to increase cardiovascular fitness levels, you should do cardio before resistance training.

On the other hand, if your goal is fat and weight loss, a current mindset in the fitness community is that by doing a cardio workout after resistance exercise, you increase your rate of fat metabolism (burning fat). of fat, as it is often referred to as). The theory is that by engaging in intense resistance training, you will deplete the glycogen stores in your muscles during this workout. Once glycogen stores are depleted, the body begins to use the fats in the body for fuel. Endurance athletes have known this for a long time, but typically for this to happen in endurance training, an athlete has to run continuously for about 90 minutes to completely deplete muscle glycogen. Therefore, I remain somewhat skeptical that many average trainees push themselves to the point of glycogen depletion during their resistance training, particularly workouts less than an hour in duration. For more advanced trainers, I think it is possible and therefore can be an effective means of reducing body fat, perhaps for these people.

I tend to look at it this way, if you’re participating in cardio and resistance training on the same day, one or the other will naturally have a lower intensity level. Again, evaluate your personal fitness goals before deciding whether to do your cardio before or after resistance training. If you’re trying to build muscle, you want to have as much muscular strength as you can available for your resistance workouts, so doing cardio before weight training would be counterproductive to your muscle-building goals. If you’re looking to gain endurance or heart health, focus on cardio and do those first. Remember, regardless of what you end up doing first, it’s most important to properly warm up with a minimum of 5 to 10 minutes of cardio (even if it’s just a brisk walk on the treadmill) to prepare the body for the workouts ahead, to put your head in the correct space for a productive workout and, more importantly, to reduce the risk of injury. This debate will mean nothing if you get injured 5 minutes into a workout and are out for the next 8 weeks rehabbing an injury!

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